There are three extended interviews
with Tim Rose featured in this website, One that I
had with him, along with ones for the Ptolemaic
Terrascope and the Shakenstir website. Below, I have
printed a number of shorter pieces, record reviews,
brief articles and newspaper clippings that I have
amassed over the years. As with all other materials
placed on this site, if there is anything that
breaches a journalist's copyright and that needs to
be removed, please let me know and I'll take it off.

?/?/71 Record review: Love, A Kind
of Hate Story (Capitol)

He has that guttural, saw-edged,
60-cigarettes-a-day voice which can really sell a
song. But despite choosing a fine selection of pop
material from Bee Gees' Gotta Get a Message to
You to Rare Bird's Sympathy to Peter
Saarstedt's Where Do You Go To My Lovely, the
cynical, careworn voice is not quite convincing.
(**)

7/4/71 Record review: Love, A Kind
of Hate Story (Capitol)

There is such a thing as the grain of
a song. Although a great deal can be done with any
song, to the extent that two versions are almost
unrecognisable as the same root, a singer can place
so much stress on his own vocal arrangement that he
goes across the grain. Tim Rose balances
precariously between inflicting irreparable harm and
novel interpretation. He tackles the Bee Gees'
I've Gotta Get a Message to You and Peter
Saarstedt's Where Do You Go To My Lovely with
his characteristic gutsy approach. His arrangements
are heavy on instruments, allowing them to
complement his voice without drowning it.
Particularly striking is the bass line on I've
Gotta Get a Message to You and the piano on
Dim Light a-Burning. Equally impressive is the
lead guitar work on Where Do You Go To My Lovely.
There are no credits on the sleeve, but careful
attention should give a clue to the musician
involved on this track. (A.M.)

There's something quite manic about
the acute urgency in Tim Rose's cracked bluesy rasp,
an air of forboding which only helps to add to the
desperate atmospheric mood. Working from the same
hard manual as Poor Ols Joe's With a Little Help
From My Friends, El Rose lets it bleed profusely
while the ponderous Spooky Toothed rearguard action
supplied by Gary Wright doesn't let up for one
moment. Whether it becomes the hit it deserves or
sinks with all hands onboard, this record must be
seriously regarded as one of the few definitive
Beatles interpretations.

Yes, the old Lennon-McCartney opus,
and it is the old Tim Rose, still plodding along,
world-weary as ever, with all the troubles of the
planet on his shoulders. Crossed in love again. What
would he do if he was happy? I mean he almost
succeeds in making Tim Hardin sound like John
Denver. Quite a powerful performance, with a
vigorous production by Gary Wright. There's yet
another version of If I Were a Carpenter on
the B side, a song which has been recorded by almost
everyone but Black Sabbath.

10/7/74 Cutting: Tim Rose Hides Away

Tim Rose, now resident in Britain, is
to release his first album in two years on November
8. Produced by Gary Wright and entitled Tim Rose,
the album release coincides with his performing
selected dates around the country in November and
December. A single, You've Got To Hide Your Love
Away, has been released from the album.

Among those I still treasure is Tim
Rose's Through Rose Coloured Glasses, a
collection of mainly original songs, sung in a voice
that sounded as if it had come up through a cheese
grater instead of a throat. So it was with some
expectation that I donned the headset and zeroed
into the first track, which proved to be It Takes
a Little longer, a kind of sing-along single
affair that you can forget if you want to.

The serious stuff starts with You
Can't Keep Me, featuring Rose in Morning Dew
mood, just acoustic guitar and those world-worn
tonsils wrapped around the kind of goodbye song you
shouldn't play if you're feeling completely brought
down.

Then, there's the flailing,
Cocker-like Hide Your Love Away and, best of
all, an atmospheric If I Were a Carpenter on
which the backup band - Gary Wright (keyboards),
Archie Leggett (bass), Mick Jones (guitar) - really
gel, though drummer Bryson Graham is inclined to be
over-busy.

Of the rest, I have a preference for
Crying Shame, a Wright original that sounds
as if it might have been written for Jagger to stomp
around and Goin' Down in Hollywood, a kind of
rocker's eye view of Dory Previn's Mary C Brown.

A good enough album, then, recorded
originally - believe it or not - for Hugh Hefner's
Playboy label. If Pye had provided a free Bunny with
each copy, I might have waxed even more
enthusiastic! (Fred Dellar)

18/5/75 Record review: The
Musician/7:30 Song (Single, Atlantic K 10667)

Nice to hear the beautifully broken
voice of the Morning Dew man back again after
a long lay-off. Song ain't that strong, though.

18/5/75 Record review: The
Musician (Single, Atlantic)

Morning Dew
still hangs over the shoulders of Tim Rose, who
offers a punchy ballad that grows on you after a few
plays, but doesn't really cut much ice as a
potential single hit. His throaty voice skirts over
a full production with some tasteful acoustic guitar
holding the track together, but there's no
discernable hook to catch the ear of the chart.

18/5/75 Record review: The
Musician (Atlantic)

Tim Rose's career has not been
remarkable for its consistency. He's best
remembered, of course, for two songs popularised
during the latter half of the last decade -
Morning Dew and Come Away Melinda.
Nothing since has been associated so strongly with
him. This new collection brings little to the
meandering course of his career. Its unevenness
must, in part, be attributed to the fact that it was
recorded in four different studios by three
producers (Jonathon Rowlands, Hugh Murphy and Rose
himself, who handled the production of Neil Young's
Old Man). The presence of a nucleus of
proficient musicians - including Tommy Eyre
(keyboards), Ray Martinez (guitar), Dave Charles
(drums), B J Cole (steel guitar) and either Paul
Cobbald or Roger Sutton (bass) - ensures that the
album at least stands up.

But there is a fundamental lack of
cohesion, stemming both from the uncertainty of the
production and the unsuitability of much of the
material. There are four original compositions here,
all of which are fairly attractive - though only
The Day I Spent With You is at all memorable -
and adequately performed. The remaining six tracks
offer no consolation at all. Bobby Charles' Small
Town Talk is given in indifferent, almost
lethargic reading and Young's Old man is
curiously produced, with too much emphasis on
Cobbald's fuzz bass. The title track is rescued by
some spirited guitar from Martinez and a powerful
but restrained vocal from Rose. That the second
side, essentially a suite of songs devoted to the
well-worn theme of estranged lovers, is at all
successful is a tribute to Rose's ability to invest
the most lightweight material (John D Bryant's
Now You're a Lady, for instance) with an
unexpected degree of emotion. Tim Moore's Second
Avenue, with some excellent guitar from Andy
Summers, is another example of this quality and is,
perhaps, the album's outstanding track. That even
this should pall after more than three or four plays
is, however, a sad indication of the overall
standard of a rather poor record.

20/7/77 Cutting: Q & A

What has happened to Tim Rose? He was
such a promising artist with Morning Dew and
Come Away Melinda but seems to have
disappeared - Andrew Bevan, Leicester.

He spent two years in exile thinking
about music and deciding which way he wanted to put
himself across. Towards the end of 1973, he felt
ready to record again and was looking for the right
producer when he met Gary Wright on a trip to
Europe. They got on well and began to sift through
old and new material. Tim invited Gary to produce an
album and this was made with musicians from Spooky
Tooth at the Olympic Studio in London. The result is
Tim Rose on Pye, described as "an album that
reflects the gut-bucket rock singer rather than a
heavy folkie."

1/10/86 Cutting:

Would you buy stocks and securities
from this man, assuming you'd even consider buying
them from anyone in the first place? It may seem
unlikely, but Wall Street can be a strange place it
seems. Remember that three weeks ago, Thrills
lamented the absence from the recording scene of one
Tim Rose, whose 1967 classic Hey Joe has
recently been covered by Nick Cave on the Kicking
Against The Pricks LP? Well, David Rubinson -
producer of such Rose petals as Morning Dew
and the aforementioned track - writes from San
Francisco to report that the not-so-tiny Tim is very
much alive and well, selling as a broker on the New
York market. Quite a worldly pursuit for a one-time
student priest and leading light in the
singer-songwriter galaxy of the late 60s. (Burke and
Hare)

1995 CD Review: The Musician (Edsel) ***

Since the recording of this LP in 1975 and The Gambler
the following year (though the latter wasn't to be released until
1991), little has been heard of the growly ex-trainee priest Tim Rose,
who is still best known for his '60s recordings of Morning Dew (co-written with folk singer Bonnie Dobson) and his version of Hey Joe,
which inspired Jimi Hendrix to record the song. Almost 20 years of
silence is way too long, for Rose, though never a big star, was a great
singer. The re-recordings of the aforementioned hits are passable, but
better by far are three lesser known songs: Tom Jans's Loving Arms and Tim Moore's Second Avenue are just great. Rose's husky, barking aeroplane of a voice, soaring with power and ease, and though John D Bryant's Now You're a Lady has a wonky chorus, Rose manoevres around its melody lines delightfully. Tim Rose: where is he now? (John Bauldie)

1995 CD Reviews: The Big Three (Sequel); The Musician (Edsel)Of these two albums, 1963's The Big Three,
featuring not only Tim Rose but James Hendricks and the soo-to-be Mama
Cass, is the more intriguing release, and a fine example of coffeehouse
folk to boot. Although together little more than a year, the trio's
voices blended well, retaining quirks and personality while producing
an attractive and stirring sound. The missing link, one might say,
twixt Peter, Paul And Mary and the pop-soul of The Mamas And The
Papas.Rose drew on similar sources when recording his great solo
albums of the mid-'60s - and again, though with lesser effect, for
1975's The Musician. The versions of Morning Dew and Hey Joe
here both begin promisingly but soon confuse bluster with menace and
degenerate into pyrotechnics. With the slight exception of Bobby
Charles' Small Town talk,
most of the songs are simultaneously overwrought and picayune. Rose is
apparently looking to record again. Let's hope he takes his inspiration
from the primal force of his '60s recordings and not from The Musician. (Bleddyn Butcher)

16/11/96 Gig review: Half Moon,
Putney

"Hardin? Buckley? ... Oh, Tim Rose!
Isn't he dead?" The singer, inextricably linked with
a dim distant Greenwich Village scene, humbly pokes
fun at himself with the TV company so keen to tell
his story. A camera eagerly follows his every move
around the venue. They've got the right guy, sure
enough, and Tim Rose is genuinely touched by the
interest in his first UK show in 20 years. He's
giving it another shot after years lost to Wall
Street and Desolation Row.

With a one-off rasp teetering between
warmth and aggression, Rose lends the gentlest song
an edge, the harshest a certain sensitivity. Nick
Cave ambles on for Long Time Man and later
Hey Joe and even the Bad Seed knows he's in the
presence of the original Murder Balladeer here.
Hey Joe, written as a duet but rarely awarded
that treatment,, breathes new life with Cave
questioning and Rose as confessor. When Rose, kept
company throughout by the fellow acoustic guitar of
Dave Clarke, previews a tune about the protagonist
happily kept by his wealthy woman, any ideas that
age has mellowed him are cast away.

This looming figure - black suit, red
handkerchief, tinted shades, long-slicked grey hair
and winning smile - takes a third of his set from a
1967 LP. He's hard to equate with the
cigar-crunching dude on its sleeve, but that voice
is mercifully the same. The post-nuclear Come
Away Melinda is aired twice out of necessity,
and received rapturously both times, but Morning
Dew is the highlight. Stripped down, it retains
all its power, a hell of a fine thing for anyone to
hang a reputation on.

Verdict? Definitely not dead. (James
Robert)

1997 CD Review: Tim Rose/Through Rose Coloured Glasses (BGO)Tim
Rose was one of the fledgeling talents of the mid-1960s American
folk-rock scene, but rapidly outgrew that world to become a unique
white soul and blues interpreter. Originally a member of The Big Three
with mama cass Elliott 9who erself took the blue-eyed soul route), Rose
was an intriguing figure for the era. In the late 1960s, he not only
robustly flew in the face of musical convention, he also ignored
current fashions, sporting fairly short hair and working out: at a gig
in 1968 at Manchester's Magic Village club, he looked the proud
possessor of more body muscle than all the attendant hippies could
collectively have mustered.This CD is a timely re-issue, uniting in
one volume Tim's debut and second Columbia LPs (released in 1967 and
'69 respectively). The debut is a powerful, well-crafted programme
including several classic songs, among them Hey Joe, Morning Dew, Come Away Melinda, Long Time Man and Eat, Drink & Be Merry.
The sterling musical support comes courtesy of one-time Charlie Mingus
guitarist Jay Berliner, bassists Eric Weissberg and Felix Pappalardi
and acid jazz's favourite drummer Bernard Purdie (plus others).If
this opening statement was all passion and dramatic gesture, the
subsequent LP was curiously reserved and uneven. Some of the heat of
the first set is reignited on Apple Truck Swamper (which huffs and growls its way into Captain Beefheart territory) but frequently the mood is broken by the light and fluffy (Hello Sunshine) or a sadly dated 60s machismo (Baby Do You Turn Me On?). For all the resultant patchiness conferred by these low spots, Tim Rose/Through Rose Coloured Glasses documents a very singular talent and one whose recent return to recording is a welcome, if surprise, event. (John Crosby Q Magazine)

1997 CD Review: Haunted (Best Dressed Records) ***Sixties survivor Rose wrote Morning Dew and was responsible for the arrangement which Hendrix used on Hey Joe.
Then he disappeared to lead one of those colourful lives which involves
all sorts of different jobs and a lot of Jack Daniels.He re-emerged
earlier this year supporting Nick Cave at the Royal Albert Hall and,
like other veterans of the era, such as Richie Havens and John
Sebastian, puts on a fine live show in which he liberally sprinkles
anecdotes of his life and times with the songs that made him famous.This
album is a hybrid consisting of new studio material and live recordings
from the Albert Hall gig. The new songs suffer from being
over-produced, with girlie backup vocals and synths (sadly, the title
track is the worst offender), but the live takes are glorious. His
voice is gritty and lived-in and his delivery is dramatic and brooding.
The set is bookended by his two best known songs, Hey JoeMorning Dew, but equally compelling are Hanging Tree and Come Away Melinda, which vies with Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction as the best Sixties protest song Dylan never wrote.They
should have made this exclusively a live album, thrown in a few of
Rose's stories (like the time he turned down a song by a certain young
unknown called Don't Think Twice It's All Right
because he thought it rambled too much) and waited for his forthcoming
collaboration with Nick Cave to unleash the new material. (Nigel
Williamson)

1997 CD Review: Haunted (Dressed To Kill) If
we'd been permitted to take part in our own 100 Greatest Singles of All
Time poll, yours truly would have had Tim Rose's nape-bothering classic
Morning Dew high on his list. Never a hit, it nevertheless defined a strain of high octane folk, the missing link between Blonde on Blonde and Born to Run. And, of course, it was Rose's approach to Hey Joe (re-sing here as Blue Steel '44)
that Hendrix lifted to launch his career. Rose's own never took off,
his albums were spirited but patchy, retreading the bluesy Joe/Dew
dynamic too many times. Same deal here, really. The extended
demon-nailing lay-off has made his rich, battered voice resonant with
experience on the live stuff, which is more successful than the Chris
Rea-styled smoothness of new song Natural Thing
and the synth and drum-box arrangements of other cuts (including the
curious instrumental titel track). All told, not a spectacular return,
but such a seasoned survivor is always welcome. (Jim Irvin)

1998 CD Review: Hide Your Love Away (Flying Thorn) **/***A
hard-bitten singer-songwriter from the Deep South who took up fitful UK
residence in 1968, Tim Rose's career never took off commercially.
Hendrix's cover of his Hey Joe brought attention just as he released a disappointing second album. By the time of 1970's Love, A Kind of Hate Story,
and an eponymous 1974 release, his early collaborator Denny Cordell's
similarly equipped discovery, Joe Cocker, had stolen his thunder.With
Rose enjoying a late career boost, those two albums, packaged together
on this CD, reveal a twisted spirit hampered by overwrought production
and some appalling lapses of taste in choice of material (Blue Mink?
Peter Saarstedt?! Get a grip, lad). Even so, his appeal endures - a mix
of savagery and overblown grandeur has never gone amiss. Just ask the
current Rose patron, Nick Cave.The best moments - an organ-laden version of The Fabs You've Got to Hide Your love Away and his own Dim Light Burning - preserve a crusty, fossilised charm. (Gavin Martin)

2003 CD
Review: Snowed In (The Last Recordings)

Tim Rose's surly baritone was a
suitably scourging late-'60s presence on apocalyptic
protest songs such as
Come Away Melinda
and the classic
Morning Dew,
but there were fewer opportunities for prophets of
doom in the hedonistic '70s, and he soon slipped
from view.

Cover versions by Nick Cave and Robert Plant revived
interest decades later, and Rose made a return to
performance in the mid-'90s, recording three more
albums before finally succumbing to cancer in 2002,
leaving behind the material that comprises Snowed
In, a collection of murder ballads (Hanging
Tree,
Down In The Valley
and a re-recorded
Long Time Man),
loser's laments (I
Need Saving,
So Much To Lose)
and reflections on life's vicissitudes (Come
What May),
some co-written with producer Colin
Winston-Fletcher.

Best of all is Winston-Fletcher's title track, an
atmospheric monologue about enforced solitude set to
evocative sheets of synthesiser, which makes good
use of the grizzled, weather-beaten tones that had
secured Rose voiceover work on '80s commercials. An
intriguing new departure, it was sadly a style
discovered too late to affect his career. (Andy Gill,Uncut)

2010 CD Review: Tim Rose/Love - A Kind of Hate StoryFor
a short while in the late '60s, Tim was the name to have if you
happened to be a haunted singer-songwriter. In a career that was short
on hits but high on doomy gruffness, Rose completed a triumverate with
fellow Tims, Buckley and Hardin. While these complete albums from 1972
and '74 are more of a curio than a genuine revelation, both
compellingly capture the point where folk-rock meets hard rock. Lines
such as "Someday she's gonna die/She's gonna rot in Hell" make sense of
Nick Caves long-noted admiration and he even makes a version of Peter
Saarstedt's Where Do You Go To My Lovely? sound gut-quakingly tragic. (Steve Lowe)

2010 CD Review: Tim Rose/Love - A Kind of Hate StoryThe writer [sic] of Morning Dew and Come Away Melinda has never enjoyed the mass acclaim given to contemporaries like Dylan or Tim Hardin. However, Rose has recently appeared on Later With Jools,
reminding us all of his oblique talents. This two-for-one issue
collects Rose's third and fourth albums from 1970/72 [sic] which were
recorded in the UK with session players like Gary Wright, Mick Jones,
Herbie Flowers, Clem Catini and Alan Hawkshaw. The twinned set features
several Rose originals, but also includes versions of If I Were a Carpenter, I Gotta Geta Message to You and Rare Bird's Sympathy. An opportunity for rediscovery. (Kingsley Abbott)